Photo by Austin Anderson

Maadooliat plans to spend the spring semester at the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation in central Wisconsin. He will work on data sets with their Center for Human Genetics department.

Mehdi Maadooliat, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, won the Way Klinger Young Scholar Award in August.

The award allows recipients to take a semester-long sabbatical to continue their research. Recipients are given $2,000 to cover operating costs and a portion of their salary is paid for.

Maadooliat plans to spend the spring semester at the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation in central Wisconsin. He will work on data sets with the Center for Human Genetics department. One of his collaborators will be Dr. Steven Schrodi, an associate research scientist at Marshfield.

“I’m very thankful to the committee for selecting me,” Maadooliat said. “I’m sure they were all qualified candidates. Having one semester off will let me devote myself to my research and push further.”

Schrodi said the biobank at the foundation has over 20,000 participants to chose from.

“[The biobank] is composed of DNA samples, plasma, serum and linked electronic medical records,” Schrodi said. “Maadooliat and others use this resource to conduct studies designed to identify genetic causes of diseases.”

Maadooliat has worked on other projects with genetics, which helped him prepare for the research at Marshfield.

“A statistician always needs to have some kind of application,” said Maadooliat. “For my Ph.D., I did some work in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center on gene expression. During my post-doc I worked on protein structure modeling. Relatively, I was dealing with this biological type of data in different phases. Now I have an opportunity to work on this next sequencing type of data at Marshfield.”

Maadooliat emphasized the help he received from his statistics collaborators at Marquette. He singled out Naveen Bansal, another professor in the department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science.

“(Maadooliat) was a student of ours a long time back and I was very impressed with him,” Bansal said. “I’m kind of a mentor (to) him, but I’m really glad to have him. He has a depth of computational statistics that I wish I had.”

Bansal thinks working at Marshfield will be a good opportunity for Maadooliat to apply his knowledge of statistics.

“He already has a collaborator at Marshfield with a medical background,” said Bansal. “It’s a good thing to have a collaborator that is outside of statistics because as a statistician you don’t always know what problems the researchers are looking for.”

Despite his plan to go to Marshfield for the spring semester, Maadooliat talked about his extensive history with Marquette and his fondness for the university.

“I came to Marquette in 2004 as a graduate student,” Maadooliat said. “I came back to the university in the fall of 2013 as an assistant professor. I’m thankful to the whole department, they were all supportive. The past three years have been wonderful and I hope I get the chance to work more here in this nice situation.”